Picturebooks
Focalization in Children’s Picture Books
On 21, Dec 2015 | In Picturebooks | By Chris Vitale
Yannicopoulou, Angela. “Focalization in Children’s Picture Books: Who Sees in Words and Pictures.” Telling Children’s Stories: Narrative Theory and Children’s Literature. Ed. Michael Cadden. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 2010. Web.
Referrer: Carrie Hintz
Categories: children’s literature, picturebooks, focalization, perspective
Annotation:
This article discusses the importance and implications of our predominantly visual culture on children’s literature. Yannicopoulou outlines the differences between different types of focalization starting with nonfocalization where the main point of focus is the characters, moving to internal focalization where the narrator is seeing the story through his or her own eyes, onto fixed internal focalization where the story is given to the reader through the restricted view of a single character. Moving beyond these, variable internal focalization, multiple internal focalization, external focalization, and discrepant modes of focalization are discussed in depth. In doing this kind of defining of focal points and perspectives, Yannicopoulou considers the assumptions that must be made from an ideology standpoint for those reading picture and nonpicture books. The role of pictures for each of the aforementioned forms of focalization is varied, but overall facilitates a type of assumptive understanding of sociological, cultural, and even historical focalization of the text, it’s characters, and it’s world. The narrative text works in conjunction with the images in order push forth verbal and visual story information.
